Helmut Newton is a major photographer, whose style overwhelmed fashion imagery like no other before. Portraits, nudes, fashion photograph, are the main focus of his works, and the three themes interweave, fashion photography mingling with nudes and erotic portraits. For Newton, moreover, the nature of fashion photography itself is to produce something else than fashion photography “I still believe that the perfect fashion photograph is a photograph that does not look like a fashion photograph. It’s a photograph that looks like something out of a movie, like a portrait, maybe a souvenir shot, maybe a paparazzi shot, anything but a fashion photograph”.

Yet, if a good fashion photograph looks very much like art, Newton will always refuse to consider his own work as artistic “Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire.” His work is that of a mercenary, proposing his knowledge and mastery to other’s business. The clients he works for are major magazines, like Vogue (together French, Italian, American, Australian, English and German issues), Elle, Playboy, Marie-Claire, Queen, Nova, Oui, or Vanity Fair. Through these magazines, which largely spread his pictures, he deploys his vision, his style, and his idea of Women.

Indeed, the central point of his work is the Woman, described as strong, determined, proud of her body and statuesque in her nudity. The Big Nudes are emblematic of this powerful, cold, distant, strict woman exposing herself with assertiveness, as a dare and a statement. In Newton’s photograph, where eroticism is omnipresent, the female body claims itself, dominative and provocative, sending the viewer back to his voyeur status. Indeed, to Newton “If a photographer says he is not a voyeur, he is an idiot”. The most controversial intimacy is laid out, free from social conventions, but made acceptable thanks to the distant, slick treatment of the picture, its refined composition, and the awe deification of the woman. Voyeurism, fetishism, sado-masochism, sophism, and sexual desire of every form, are mingling with a hybrid aesthetic, influenced by the 1930’s surrealist pictures of a latent and dark eroticism, as well as photojournalism and the New Wave, all these influences creating innovative photographs, and a highly stylized and unconventional interpretation of a privileged way of life, both decadent and elegant.

Free from any taboo, relentlessly challenging the limits of what is socially acceptable, and of the genre roles with his dominative, dangerous women, statuesque amazons with a powerful and free sexuality, The King of Kink seduced his contemporaries, making a name also out of the fashion erotic circle. He would produce portraits of such personalities as Margaret Thatcher, Salvador Dali, David Bowie or Charlotte Rampling, whose pictures marked by their simplicity and honesty. This also shows another face of the photographer, whose contentious works not only played with the codes of eroticism, but also initiated a liberation in a less show-off way, being at the origin of the mythic picture of Yves Saint Laurent’s Smoking, where women empowerment also goes through a subdued androgyny.

Born in Berlin in 1920, under the name of Helmut Neustädter, Helmut Newton studied to the Berlin American School, before doing an apprenticeship with the famous photographer Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon) who created dreamlike portraits and nudes for the fashion industry. Newton worked in Singapore, Australia (and took the Australian nationality in 1946), and then settled in Paris in the 1960’s, where he produced fashion photographs for magazines such as Vogue or Elle. Following a successful career in commercial and fashion photography, he settled his first solo exhibition in 1975, and in 1990 was awarded the French “Grand Prix national de la Photographie”. He passed away in 2004 in Los Angeles, few months after creating the Helmut Newton Foundation. Recently, his works have been exposed in the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin, 2000) on the occasion of his 80th birthday retrospective, which travelled in London, New York, Tokyo, Moscow or Prague. His works have also been featured in exhibits in the Hamiltons Gallery (London, 2009-2011), Grand Palais (Paris, 2012), Newton Foundation (Berlin, 2012-14-15), Foam Fotografiemuseum (Amsterdam, 2016), Helmut Newton Foundation (Berlin, 2016), Casa dei Tre Oci (Venice, 2016). His work is mainly owned by the Helmut Newton Foundation (Berlin).